California’s workplace-safety watchdog agency should get another $9 million in next year’s budget so it can hire 100 more inspectors, the inspectors’ union proposed Monday.

The California Association of Professional Scientists’ proposal comes one month after the state auditor found the Division of Occupational Safety and Health failed to properly monitor and act upon injury reports and safety complaints on the $1.7 billion replacement of the Bay Bridge’s eastern span.

“We think it has traction on both sides of the aisle,” said CAPS statewide representative Chris Voight, adding that the union already has put the proposal before the Assembly and state Senate budget committees and soon will start discussions with key lawmakers.

“It’s a significant cost item,and we expect it to be contentious — there are a lot of interests vying for dollars — but we believe worker safety is pretty important in the grand scheme of things,” he said.

Voight noted the already short-staffed Cal-OSHA will find itself even further under the gun if the governor and the Legislature succeed in hammering out an infrastructure bond plan leading to “massive new construction” all over the state.

But state Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer said “the first order of business would be to address the number of positions that are authorized but not filled. … Before we would consider adding additional positions, we would looking at filling those positions that are now vacant.”

February’s audit found Cal-OSHA “did not align with state law” regarding Bay Bridge worker complaints of potentially hazardous conditions and did not adequately probe three of six worker complaints. It also said Cal-OSHA did not discover potential underreporting of injuries on the project.

Cal-OSHA officials, reacting in January to an early draft of the audit, had contended they do not have enough staff and money to handle monitoring such reports’ accuracy. But that is not a duty the agency should ignore, State Auditor Elaine Howle concluded: If money is a problem, Cal-OSHA should ask for more.

CAPS’s proposal would add about 10.3 percent to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s proposed $87.5 million Cal-OSHA allocation for 2006-07. It would hike the agency’s number of authorized workplace inspector positions from 200 — of which only 170 are currently filled — to 300, giving Cal-OSHA the same inspector-to-worker ratio that the federal OSHA has nationwide, the union said.

Each of the current 170 inspectors is responsible for more than 100,000 workers and 6,800 work sites, the union noted, while neighboring states such as Oregon and Washington have an inspector-to-worker ratio about one-quarter of California’s.

"There is a general recognition that we don't need these military-style weapons in New Zealand, so it's very easy to win cross-party support for this," said Mark Mitchell, who was defense minister in the previous, center-right government and who supports the ban initiated by the center-left-led Labour Party.